


love creates me and goes free

by 2pork



Series: 5 things and you [3]
Category: Produce 101 (TV), Wanna One (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Domestic, Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Domestic Fluff, Fluff, JinHwi cameo, M/M, actual sparks fly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-14
Updated: 2017-11-14
Packaged: 2019-02-02 06:14:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12721161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/2pork/pseuds/2pork
Summary: Jihoon is everything in nature that works to drive Woojin away and pull him in at the same time.(Five moments in a magic-filled love.)





	love creates me and goes free

*

 

At first, a life with Park Jihoon hovering at the edge of Woojin’s consciousness is a mess he can’t wait to graduate away from, an inconvenience. Jihoon is like the capricious wind, gentle and cruel, caressing and destructive. He’s the lightest of drizzles at dawn and the blizzard that steals the vision, steals away each of the senses until all that’s left is the vague consciousness that, somehow, you are still alive.

For Woojin who sleeps and wakes, eats and leaves the house at the same time everyday, a life with Park Jihoon is too much. The alternating force and fragility, the misleading coyness that traps any unsuspecting person into his charms, it seems like everything about Jihoon works to drive Woojin and his dedication to a simple life away.

Except Jihoon is a friend of a friend. A friend of Jinyoung, who’s a “friend” of Daehwi, to be exact. Always dragged along to wherever their group meets up, and always game to have fun. He fits in, and maybe he is less attention-seeking than Woojin’s friends, but he doesn’t need to try because Woojin’s eyes can spot him easily from a crowd.

“It’s because you keep wearing those loud sweaters, hyung,” Woojin had once heard Daehwi complain to Jihoon, but it’s not quite that either. Jihoon constantly wears things that look like a color wheel threw up on them, and he flirts through his shy smiles and twinkling brown eyes instead of words, and he seems capable of doing anything he sets his mind to, but there is a deeper pull to him that has Woojin sucked into his orbit, unable, unwilling, to escape.

Then Jihoon, a friend of a friend, becomes Jihoon, a good friend, and then Jihoon, “ _my_ best friend”, and it occurs to Woojin that perhaps he hasn’t been trying all that hard to escape.

 

It seems like the most natural thing to do, asking Jihoon if they can live together after graduation, so he doesn’t understand the sparks that shoot out of Jihoon’s hair, pinks and reds that take attention away from the same color blooming on his cheeks. Not that it works.

Sometimes when Woojin looks at Jihoon, he wishes he has more than one pair of eyes on his head. As it is, the pair he does have flits towards every part of Jihoon he can see.

A few seconds later, Jihoon stutters out an _okay_ that has Woojin in multiple fits of nervousness the entire walk to his dorm.

He doesn’t understand that either.

 

*

 

“ _No_ , Woojin, the problem is neither of us have taken specialist classes, which means we’ll probably sink this entire _venture_ to the ground faster than Daehwi and Jinyoung fell in love!”

Woojin can’t help the amazed whistle that escapes his lips. “That’s damned fast,” he says, and grins through Jihoon’s barrage of napkins thrown in his direction, especially since none of them reach him.

“It is!” Jihoon exclaims in frustration. “Just, can we not rush through this right now and think it over a bit more?” He slams his quill down on the dining table, jumping in his seat when the milk in his over-filled cereal bowl threatens to spill over. It doesn’t. “Ugh. My life.”

“You’re being a lot more dramatic today,” Woojin comments as he watches Jihoon pluck the bowl up and set it down closer to him gingerly. “And on our time of the month too.”

Jihoon snorts.

“You know you like it.” Woojin cradles his chin in one hand, a mischievous smile playing on his lips. He sees how Jihoon ducks his gaze, lips pursed the way he does when he’s trying to hold back his laughter. It’s the cutest thing to see over the half-assed lunch they’d prepared together, though there’s really no competition from any corner. Jihoon is always the highlight of Woojin’s day.

Jihoon clears his throat and admits very quietly, “I do like it,” and it makes something flutter from Woojin’s stomach up his chest. “But don’t ever refer to it as our time of the month in public.”

“True,” Woojin agrees. “Wouldn’t want them to get curious about our _mysterious activities_.”

“Mysterious—” Jihoon rolls his eyes emphatically. “This is precisely why. You keep putting weird connotations on perfectly normal friend activities!”

“Yeah, scheduling joint leaves every month because you can’t get enough of me is a perfectly normal friend activity.”

“That’s… you know that’s not why! And it’s not every month, _stop teasing me,_ Dork Woojin!”

Woojin bursts into laughter, taking genuine pleasure in flustering Jihoon pink. He only gets this easily embarrassed closer to the full moon, as Woojin had discovered weeks after they’d moved into a two-bedroom apartment, and Woojin never hesitates to take advantage of it. “Stop making it so easy, then,” he retorts, still chuckling.

Jihoon crosses his arms, pouting up a literal storm. His hair fluffs up, presumably from the vague impression of dark, gray clouds forming on top of his head.

Woojin registers a flicker of light and then a zap of pain on his arm, causing him to yelp.

“Serves you right, fucker.”

The funny thing is Woojin can’t even be angry at the self-satisfied grin Jihoon is sporting.

 

*

 

It’s a strange effect that the moon has on people like Jihoon and him, blessed with cores of pure magical energy.

For most, like Woojin, the energy swells like a steadily rising tide days before the full moon and recedes as the light is obscured in shadow. For Jihoon, the entire week of the full moon is a trial of control, with his energy fluctuating erratically and spiralling out of control.

Today especially, with the rising of the full moon in less than twenty-four hours, the fluctuations are wilder. It had woken them up at dawn when a sudden spike had sent Jihoon flying from the bed and slamming hard into the wall of his room. Woojin, shocked out of slumber, had run to find the source of the noise and found Jihoon sprawled on the floor, cradling his shoulder and whimpering. He’d kissed away the bruises without thinking, without paying heed to the hitch in Jihoon’s breath as he pressed his lips to the tender spots on Jihoon’s temple and shoulder.

Now Jihoon sits on the opposite end of the couch, hugging his knees to his chest, and Woojin just—doesn’t understand, but the distance Jihoon imposed is painful to keep, even more painful to cross.

“Jihoon, please stop with the thorny vines, you’re going to ruin the couch,” Woojin warns to what seems like deaf ears, if how the thorns seem to grow bigger and pointier is any indication. “I mean it. You’re gonna have a hell of a time tying those fibers back together.”

The only thing Jihoon says in return is, “Don’t do that again.”

So Woojin frowns at him and his wall of thorny vines and thinks, _Nope._ He says it too for good measure, “Nope,” and sits back on his end of the couch (a novelty, they’ve never been on separate ends before) as Jihoon pushes away from his slump and glares at him, eyelashes wet and lower lip bitten through. The vines bristle defensively, going from a loose sprawl to close in on Jihoon.

“Stop that!” snaps Woojin. His hand whips outwards and the vines drop to the ground, to the couch, flattened with the force by which he’s keeping them there, and they’re swept to the side with a flick of Woojin’s wrist, leaving the path towards Jihoon free.

Jihoon hasn’t stopped looking at Woojin, his expression more conflicted than ever. “Why? Why did you do that?” he asks.

“Why—because you were about to hurt yourself, idiot!”

Jihoon flinches back, but gathers himself quickly and shouts, “I wasn’t meaning to!”

“You do stupid things without meaning to,” Woojin shoots back, just as agitated, and it feels like a whirlwind is building up around them from their energies striking outwards in search of a threat. He should calm down, they should _both_ calm down, so Woojin gets to his feet and goes inside his bedroom without saying anything further.

And that’s that.

 

*

 

Woojin can’t recall when he started thinking of Jihoon as the most beautiful person he’d ever laid his eyes on, but it must have been very early into their acquaintance. This tightening in his lungs, his heart, this cramp in his stomach, have become familiar friends after so long. He doesn’t know why and how seeing Jihoon lost in what he’s doing keeps catching him off guard, but it does.

He’s home after wasting a few hours outside, because the worry that something else could happen to Jihoon while Woojin was out (and not even enjoying himself) overran his thoughts until he was already half the distance back.

The first thing he notices upon stepping inside is the smell of ramyeon. There’s a still-steaming pot and 2 bowls on the table. He’s hit with disappointment to find that Jihoon is nowhere in sight, and this— this solitude isn’t what he wants right now. What he wants is to make sure that Jihoon is okay, some reassurance that Woojin’s unthinking actions hasn’t torn at their relationship irreparably, so he goes looking.

 

Woojin stumbles upon him in the dimly lit living room, cross-legged on the floor and poring over a stack of their old textbooks, surrounded by miniscule spheres of light. They float around the room in gentle motions, like small fireflies, but the warmth of them is so very like Jihoon that there’s no question about how they’d come to be.

The corner lamp is set up beside the coffee table, brightening only the area where Jihoon works, and the sight of him from where Woojin is standing, slouched over a book, eyes roving over the text while his hands deftly roll a small pile of papers into three inch cylinders, is so unrealistically beautiful he can hardly speak in fear of breaking the tranquil atmosphere.

Jihoon looks up at that moment, meeting Woojin’s gaze with his own, and pulled as always into Jihoon’s orbit, it’s as if Woojin can’t cross the distance between them fast enough. The line of Jihoon’s lips trace into a timid smile as he says, “You’re home.”

Woojin takes a step forward, then another, then another, until he’s kneeling and pulling Jihoon into his arms, and he answers, “I’m home.”

 

*

 

They slip back into a parody of their daily life, where everything is exactly the same, except it’s really, laughably, not. Because somehow after the hug that was supposed to fix everything (some plans are just doomed to fail, sue him), Jihoon had gotten even more jittery. With the waning of the moon, it can’t be because of the instability of his magical core, so Woojin is at a loss.

“What’s new?” Daehwi hisses just as Jihoon and Jinyoung come back to their table, a drink in each hand. Woojin wants to put him in a headlock but that would be too suspicious.

… Actually it wouldn’t be, but Daehwi is already moving his seat closer to Jinyoung, and Jihoon is grinning at Woojin with more happiness than he’d been witness to this past week. He lets himself be swept into it, this meeting, into the conversation, into the ebb and flow of whatever his and Jihoon’s relationship is slowly morphing into. Because it’s Jihoon. Because he’s not just Woojin’s best friend anymore, and Woojin may not know what the hell they are, but he’s definitely going to be here to find out.

Either he stares too long (it’s easy to get lost in it), or Jihoon catches him at just the right moment. Suddenly, there’s a kick to his shin, and Jihoon is asking, “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like there’s something really funny on my face and you’re too amused to tell me.” Jihoon rubs at his chin self-consciously, and then his cheek, heading with soft strokes to the corner of his mouth, but Woojin grabs his wrist before he could get that far. Jihoon blinks, and a cloud of steam puffs up from his coffee cup. “W… what is it?”

Woojin leans closer to him and breathes, “That’s not why I was looking,” into his ear. He shifts back to his seat and glares defiantly at Daehwi, who has both hands clamped over his mouth, and Jinyoung, who looks about as done with them as he usually does, the hypocrite.

On the table, all their cups have erupted into steam, and Woojin thinks he’s starting to get it.

 

When Jihoon tells him, “Don’t do that again,” Woojin reaches out to hold his hand. He says, “I’ll do this, then,” and watches flowers bloom from within Jihoon’s hair.

He lets go to cup Jihoon’s flushed cheeks in his hands and kisses him, eyes fluttering shut to the faint sound of fireworks above their heads.

**Author's Note:**

> huge thanks to vanilla for the rush beta, ily!!  
> if it reads like a mess, it's because i'm a mess.
> 
> -
> 
> Let me know what you think in a comment!


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